Abstract
For those who think the notion of representation plays a critical role in visual perception, a pressing question—at least for those who are naturalistically inclined—should be that of how the mental representations acquire their contents. However, whilst this question was the source of a great deal of philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century, this has not been the case more recently, despite the fact that the notion of representation continues to play a central role in philosophical theorising about perception. In this paper, I will argue (i) that this is a significant oversight for representationalist theories, and that absent a psychosemantics, these theories remain critically incomplete; (ii) that the problems identified with extant theories have not been resolved, so the representationalist cannot resolve this issue by simply plucking a theory off the shelf; (iii) that an appeal to a naïve realist notion of acquaintance nevertheless has the potential to ground the kind of psychosemantics the representationalist requires. This shows that the common assumption that naïve realism and representationalism are in competition is mistaken, and that theories of perception that make use of a notion of representation can only get off the ground if naïve realism, or something like it, is true.
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Notes
- 1.
For many, talking in terms of experiences and talking in terms of the sensory states produced by the visual system are in fact two ways of talking about the same thing: that “the [psychological] theory of vision is entirely about … visual states of individuals, ordinarily so-called” (Burge, 2005: 22). For reasons that will become clear in due course, however, I will talk in terms of experiences when I am talking about personal level states of a subject, and sensory states when I am talking about the subpersonal states involved in our sensory systems. Following from the brief discussion of the history of psychosemantic theories, I take the primary purpose of psychosemantics to be the attribution of contents to sensory states (which, for many, will be equivalent to attributing contents to experiences).
- 2.
The third horseman, Bill Lycan, does not outline a view in any detail—acknowledging that he has “no worked-out psychosemantics” himself—but does suggest that his “sympathies lie with etiological accounts of representation, and more specifically with teleologized etiological accounts” (1996: 75). This relatively broad statement does, however, leave open the possibility of endorsing a more consumer-centric version of the view such as the developed by Ruth Millikan (1989, 1991). The difference between the views is that, whilst Dretske focuses on the evolutionary history of the producer of the representation—requiring that, to represent F, an F-indicator has to be selected for by evolution for that reason—Millikan allows the consumer of the representation to fix what the representation represents (strictly speaking, Dretske allows the consumer to fix the status as a representation, but not the content). So where Dretske requires that, wherever a property is found in a representational content, there must be a story as to why the indication of that very property played the kind of role that led to its being preferred by natural selection, a Millikan-style consumer-centric view will hold that, in order for mental state M to represent R, the consumer of M (the system) must use Ms as carrying information about Rness in the service of fulfilling the system’s biological functions. These differences will not be central to what follows.
- 3.
There is also another dimension of the indeterminacy problem. From all of the many causal antecedents of a particular sensory state, the psychosemantic program is attempting to identify one privileged cause to stand as the state’s representata. Peter Godfrey-Smith draws a distinction between “competing ‘vertical’ causal factors, factors the same ‘distance’ from the system, and on the other hand competing ‘horizontal’ factors, factors more proximal and distal in the causal chain” (1989: 535–6). The different potential representata described above are examples of competing vertical factors: the same element in the causal process can be described in different ways (fly, food, packet of nutrients, small moving dark thing). In addition to this, there are also horizontal competitors too—for instance, whenever the frog sees a fly move across its visual field, a certain type of retinal stimulation will be involved. The second—horizontal—dimension of the problem is thus on what grounds we are entitled to claim that the experience represents fly as opposed to fly-type-retinal-stimulation.
- 4.
Relatedly, an appropriate psychosemantics should also predict content variations where we find phenomenal variations. Consider, in this context, the case of simultaneous contrast, in which a single patch of color looks different against different backgrounds. If, as seems to be the case, the phenomenology of these two experiences of the same color patch differ, then our psychosemantics should deliver distinct contents to the sensory states involved in these two cases, despite the color of the patch itself remaining unchanged.
- 5.
A similar problem affects versions of teleosemantics that focus on the consumer, such as Millikan’s. On such views, the sensory state in question does not represent a particular shade of color because it was selected for on the basis that it indicates this shade, but because the sensory system evolved with the detection of this shade as one of its capacities, and the consumer of the representations used its deliveries to provide it with the fitness-enhancing ability to distinguish the colors of things. Yet there remains a concern. If our sensory systems deliver more information than the consumer of the experiences can make use of—as our capacity to distinguish millions of shades suggests—then then this type of account does not explain how sensory states come to represent these features. Yet if sensory content is only as rich as the consumer can make use of, then it doesn’t appear to leave room for the system to learn to retrieve information from its sensory states that it was previously unable to access (Cummins et al., 2006).
- 6.
- 7.
For this reason, naive realism is often aligned with a rejection of the claim that perceptual experiences represent things to be a certain way on the grounds that they simply present things as being as they are, and that there is therefore no question of experiences being incorrect (e.g. Austin, 1962: 11; Travis, 2004). This is why I earlier committed to using “experiences” to name personal level conscious states and “sensory states” to name the states in subpersonal systems. Naïve realism, as I understand the view, does not follow the tradition of taking these to be two ways of referring to the same thing. As McDowell insists: “Experiences are states of perceivers; the states that perceptual systems get into … are states of perceptual systems” (2010: 250). With this distinction in mind, the suggestion explored here is that a perceiver’s personal level experiences, whilst not being themselves representational, may nonetheless be the source of the contents of the sub-personal states of the perceiver’s perceptual systems.
- 8.
What about cases of highly detailed zebra models, holograms, and the like? In such cases, it seems less plausible to claim that the zebra replica is not revealed in the subject’s experience, even though it is not revealed as a replica. To accommodate such cases without claiming that the relevant sensory state represents zebra or zebra replica, we might appeal to features of Jerry Fodor’s asymmetric dependence theory. We might claim that if something that is not a zebra (such as a zebra model or a hologram) gives rise to zebra-states (sensory states that represent zebras), then the ability of such objects to cause zebra-states is parasitic on the mechanisms by which zebras cause “zebra-states. If we made it the case that zebras themselves could no longer cause zebra-states under any circumstances, then this would thereby block things that were designed to look like zebras from causing zebra-states too. Yet, for any given zebra model or hologram, if we broke the causal chain that enabled that object to cause a zebra-state, this would still leave zebras able to cause zebra-states through other causal mechanisms. We could therefore follow Fodor in holding that a sensory zebra-state “means [zebra] because … non[zebra]-caused [zebra-states] are asymmetrically dependent upon [zebra]-caused [zebra-states]” (1990: 91).
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Fish, W. (2024). Naïve Realism as Psychosemantics. In: French, R., Brogaard, B. (eds) The Roles of Representation in Visual Perception. Synthese Library, vol 486. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57353-8_11
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